All operations completed. Results: everything seems to be like before :-P I can not yet attest to the "sent messages getting lost" or other issues that occur during usage, but the sms history is now repaired (!) for one of the important sms threads I inspected. Thanks! p.s. Do you know how to force Nokia Ovi Suite to reload msgs from the device so that the phone database changes would get reflected on my PC? (Without deleting the Ovi database. I have old msgs that are no longer on the phone [I cleared all sms threads on my N900 sometime ago] and also other older Nokia both stored in Ovi.)